Mail Goggles block those messages you shouldn’t send

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“Beer goggles” can make you do things you may later deeply regret but Gmail hopes its new “Mail Goggles” will ensure that sending embarassing emails isn’t one of them.

The feature, rolled out this week by Google, requires users to solve a few timed math problems after they click the “send” button, to verify they are “in the right state of mind” to send that late-night missive.

In its default setting, Mail Goggles is active only late on weekend nights “as that is the time you’re most likely to need it,” but can be activated at other times as well, Gmail engineer Jon Perlow said in a posting on the Official Gmail Blog.

Perlow said he designed Mail Goggles to spare others the pain inflicted by messages that should never have seen the sober light of day — that desperate love letter to your ex, or the brilliant riposte telling the whole office what you really think of your boss.

Forget what Google is “imposing”–this looks like something that is used per the user’s desires. My observation is that if people are mindless enough to send out of control e-mails when they are overtired, drunk or angry, maybe the consequences will be a source of education to them. Just another market identified: those who want someone else to control them because they are too lazy to control themselves.